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"LaLee's Kin continues the tradition, taking us deep into the Mississippi Delta and the intertwined lives of Lalee Wallace, a great-grandmother struggling to hold her world together in the face of dire poverty, and Reggie Barnes, superintendent of the embattled West Tallahatchie school system. Through the technique of direct cinema, pioneered in the 1960s as a way to bring real-life stories to audiences with unprecedented intimacy, LaLee's Kin explores the painful legacy of slavery and sharecropping in the Delta.

62-year old LaLee Wallace is the lifeblood of this film. Matriarch to an extended family that moves in and out of her house, LaLee is a woman of contradictions and hope. "Could have been worse," she says quietly, surveying the rat- and roach-infested trailer she has been granted through a government program after her own house was condemned. The electricity on this new trailer doesn't work and there is no running water. She receives a monthly disability check and earns a negligible seasonal income cooking meals for workers at nearby cotton gins. Still, she is glad to be out of the fields.

Wallace grew up in a family of sharecroppers; she began picking cotton at the age of six, stopped attending school a few years later, and still cannot read. As happened throughout the South, sharecropping gave way to low-paid labor, but with the enforcement of minimum wage laws and increasing mechanization, even those jobs were hard to come by. Without education or skills, Wallace and other residents of Tallahatchie County had few options, and the poverty and hopelessness they felt was passed down to the generations that followed.

The film also profiles educator Reggie Barnes, who is determined to stop this cycle. Barnes was hired as Superintendent of Schools in West Tallahatchie in an effort to get the school district off probation, where it was placed by the Mississippi Department of Education because of poor student performance on statewide standardized tests (the Iowa Test for Basic Skills, ITBS). If Barnes fails to raise the school from its current Level 1 status to a Level 2, the state of Mississippi has threatened to take it over. Barnes and his faculty oppose this, fearing that administrators in far-off Jackson would not do as well in addressing the special needs of their community. "It's a different world," he says. "We get kids in kindergarten who don't know their names; we get kids in kindergarten who don't know colors; we gets kids in kindergarten who've never been read to." He adds, "If we can educate the children of the illiterate parent, we stop the vicious cycle." As committed as he is, Barnes is frustrated by the lack of resources and the Catch 22 of obtaining them: schools depend on local taxes for support, but it's hard to attract industry to an area when the schools are failing.

Producer/director Susan Froemke and cinematographer Albert Maysles spent weeks at a time in West Tallahatchie, filming over the course of two school years. Seventy-five hours of footage were then shaped in the editing room by Froemke and editor/director Deborah Dickson. In the tradition of direct cinema, there is no narration and no academic analysis: just real life, marked by joy, frustration, and above all, effort. Ordinary events become insurmountable, as when LaLee registers Gregory (nicknamed "Redman"), the grandson she has raised, for kindergarten. She is given a list of items the students are expected to have on the first day of school, including writing supplies, paper towels, and crayons. She conveys this information to her granddaughter "San," whose children -- first grader Antonio (called "Main") and sixth grader Cassandra (called "Granny"), are mostly in LaLee's care. The next afternoon, in one of the film's most heartbreaking scenes, LaLee discovers that neither Granny nor Main made it to school, because their mother didn't have money for paper or pencils.

Granny is this film's Cinderella, a bright, inquisitive girl limited by circumstances to a life of childcare and housework, with little time for school. During the filming, she engineers her own escape, asking her paternal grandfather to take her in. Through him and through her paternal grandmother, Granny begins to thrive in Memphis; she joyfully celebrates her birthday with friends her own age, is proud to earn a B+ average in school, and for the first time, envisions a future for herself as a college-educated nurse. But her hopes may be dashed because her mother calls her home to help out with her siblings.

Back in West Tallahatchie, Reggie Barnes continues to serve as educator, administrator, and head cheerleader for his troubled schools. Finally, his persistence pays off: student scores rise, and after five years, the West Talahatchie School District is taken off probation. Students and teachers are jubilant, but Barnes is cautious: passing the standardized test and becoming educated are two different things. Still, he is optimistic for these children of the Mississippi Delta: "Somebody's got to believe that things are going to get better," he says." - http://www.laleeskin.com/synopsis.html

This is 2001, not 1960...and don't think it's just in Mississippi.